My parents travel with O2 in their car so my Dad can breathe. I was terrified when I first heard the news clip, then realized that my parents are able to follow basic safety directions and know not to light up next to the tank.

/Dad can't inhale enough to smoke anymore anyway/Damn you COPD and cigarettes/they're still toast if someone crashes into them, however.

Disregarding the fact that you can catch on fire, who the hell smokes in a car with someone who needs oxygen? Can't you just wait until you get out of the car. Just seems like common sense seeing as that person already has breathing problem.

Back in my youth, I delivered oxygen to patients at home. I drove a route for over a year and regularly saw people lighting up while actively using their oxygen and none of them ever had a problem. Oxygen doesn't "blow up" - it just makes existing fires burn a lot faster. I always laughed when the smokers complained their cigarettes only lasted half as long anymore.

I suspect the cigarette burned with an open flame instead of an ember and the smoker panicked and dropped it. Things just got worse from there.

Disregarding the fact that you can catch on fire, who the hell smokes in a car with someone who needs oxygen? Can't you just wait until you get out of the car. Just seems like common sense seeing as that person already has breathing problem.

Many people who smoke are in denial that their smoking affects anyone or anything. They don't think that their smoke contributes to anyone's breathing problems and don't think of a lit cigarette as a source of fire.

What the article left out is whether the tank in the trunk got hot enough to explode from pressure buildup which is not likely or even if the tank the occupant was using was involved, probably not. However, since most people are terrified of oxygen I use this to keep them from smoking around me. Ignorance is my friend.

I worked for several years in the last decade at a facility in a remote high-altitude setting, built in the late 1960s with a control room that was designed to be "oxygenated." To this day, there are gauges on the end wall of that room to show the flow of oxygen into the room and all that, but Apollo 1 happened during construction and to my knowledge, that was the end of that idea. Instead, they've had 42 years of people working in 0.6 atmospheres.

Roads have been improved over that time, but even now it'd take the nearest ambulance fire truck probably 90 minutes to get there, and it'd take about that long to get somebody to the nearest hospital. Definitely not the kind of place you want to make any sudden discoveries of the combustive kind. I still work at another (much newer) facility in the same complex, but nowadays, if somebody needs supplemental oxygen, they just strap on a portable Helios medical oxygen unit, and if they want to blow themselves up, they can go do it outside. ;)